Batsman of the decade? Probably. But player of the decade? No way!
Ricky? Ricky Ponting!? Player of the decade!? Cricinfo, the cricket website, normally makes for delightful read. But its choice of Ponting as the player of the decade is hard to digest.
There can be many arguments in favour of Ponting. In the decade he scored 19,000 international runs, adorned with 55 centuries, spread over 13 countries and three formats. No batsman before him had hit 15,000 in a decade. He also won two world cups as captain, contributing significantly with the bat in both campaigns.
Curiously, when Sunil Gavaskar was piling on the runs in the 1970s and 80s, the pundits never recognised him as the best batsman of the time. To them, Vivian Richards was the best. Some even picked Greg Chappell. Statistics, they said, never told the entire story. What mattered more was the way in which the runs were scored, and the impact the batsman had on the game.
By these yardsticks, several batsmen would be ahead of Ponting despite his mountain of runs. Tendulkar and Lara are obvious names, so Umpire’s Post would desist from tossing them in the air.
But what about Virender Sehwag? He has played stupendous innings. At a time when over rates slowed, Sehwag scored faster, the icing on the cake being his recent 284 in a Test match day against Sri Lanka when all of 79 overs were bowled. Other than Bradman, Sehwag is the only one to have crossed 290 three times. He averages more than Gavaskar and 75 per cent of his centuries have been above 150.
Now look at the speed of scoring. Sehwag has outscored belligerent batsmen like Matthew Hayden and Chris Gayle by more than 20 runs per 100 balls. He is 16 runs per 100 balls ahead of Jayasuriya. He averages 50.48 away from India as an opener and has scored seven of his 16 hundreds on foreign soil.
More From This Section
Ponting’s most memorable performance came in his fifth Test, an 88 at the Gabba, during which he took on four fearsome West Indian bowlers to resurrect the innings. But that was in the late 1990s, the previous decade. In 2002, when Wisden profiled the world’s 40 finest cricketers, Ponting was listed neither among “the all-time greats” nor the “the almost-greats”.
There are three other things that make Cricinfo’s choice doubtful. First, the noughties were the batsman’s decade. As many as 21 batsmen averaged more than 50 in the decade, against a mere 28 in the 50 years before 2000.
So it is no great shakes that of one of them did very well, especially in a decade when Adam Gilchrist won countless matches and changed the way people thought of wicketkeepers. Secondly, Sambit Bal, Crininfo’s editor and an insightful writer, revealed in his blog that Ponting was not his choice. And third, the second place in the ranking went to Jaques Kallis. Yaaawwwwn! .
Suveen K Sinha is resident editor, Business Standard, New Delhi